The Princess of Caldris (5 page)

I gathered my resolve. A
Hammerhead jump ship. The jumps Hammerheads were designed for were
large star carriers to planet jumps and back. I had never heard of
one with hyper jump capabilities. Apparently the Royal Security
Police had made some modifications. In system jumps were not that
unusual, but neither were they very common either. There is lot of
stuff to hit in an Oort cloud at the edge of a star system.
Hammerheads were manufactured in CCCE space.

The irony of going to meet
the galactic derelict, an ancient CCCE frigate, on a contemporary
CCCE manufactured vessel struck me then. However, even their
fearsome Hammerheads are incomparable to the technologies of CCCE’s
first armada.

The Great Arcturian war,
devastating the Arcturian Colonials, had left an economic and
technological chill in the Galaxy for centuries. When they say they
‘don’t make them like they used too,” rest assured they mean the
likes of a Sunrider.

One of the greatest star ships ever built,
military class or civilian; and I was going to see one.

Clairissa Maggio, Caldris
palace Library archaeological log. 3983, Moonsweek, Apogee,
Threeday.!:55 E.H The Arcturian O’Neal station is a testament to
their space engineering. Fifty kilometers long the station had
apparently been the largest settlement in system and directed high
energy farming from a solar panel array. The array, of some note in
archaeological architectural circles for some time, remains still
in various conditions in orbit. A matrix of panels encompassing a
full inner orbit of the star, its Herculean scale remains
impressive; one more testament to the greatness of the ancients and
that era. No modern array equals it size in any of the Republics
and Kingdoms, save Imperial CCCE of course.

Yet the O’Neal station was
not the only find, and from here luck turns to legend. A Sunrider
war frigate is lodged in the side. It is a timely find as well. The
two artifact menagerie’s decaying orbit would reach a soft cloud
corona sometime in the near future, and with the hull breach caused
by the Sunrider impact, not even the hard shielded O’Neal could
shelter the plethora of artifacts inside. Apparently the Sunrider
had careened into the hull of the O’Neal. The Sunrider’s Stasis
Shields had flashed on and off, moving through the O’Neal first
like butter, the ragged ultra steel against ragged ultra steel.
Back and forth, again and again in a matter of half a minute. The
interlocked ultra steel then held her in like a stinger, while the
entire atmospherics on the interior of the O’Neal bled out
furiously to space.

We’re not sure why the other environmental
habitat compartments in the O’Neal Station were breached. Further
examination will surely provide the answers. The breech safeguards
should have preserved them. We have found no intact environmental
compartments yet.

Conceivably in a colony station of this size
and sophistication biome environment compartments could still
contain living forests, with fauna and ecosystems still thriving,
unseen by human eyes for centuries, the life support still
servicing away soft rains and light.

Now that would be all the stars in a jewel
box, aye! Ha! My Archaeological Avarice is showing! Great Space
Ghost, what the technological systems on that Sunrider will be
worth to the reverse engineering departments of numerous corporate
interests...

Neil Thacker

III

Flyboys and Archaeologist
girls
.

I remember vaguely, for
even Empaths tire, Tokushima helping me into the aircar and the
strange maternal sense she conveyed mixed with the warrior aspects
of her police training and how the two worldviews like a yin and a
yang were curled up comfortably in her being. The Royal Police
Headquarters on the tangerine sea exuded a strong sense of “home”
for her when we arrived, but to me it’s Brutalist style
architecture, a combination of form follows function and mechanical
exigencies, looked none the less like giant robots, vanguards
watching over the waters.

The sun was rising before
the Hammerhead was fully prepped. Hammerstein fumed, walking around
the service bay like a caged Ripjackle from some primitive outworld
one sees in the holo-dramas. He kept thinking of how back in the
Navy, if such delays were taking place he would have had the joy of
dressing down the techs at the top of his lungs calling
them,
“Pin-head-dung-birds-pencil-necked-booty-grabbin-clowns-without-a-pair
”,
but this was the Royal Police and their protocols were different
than the Navy, so he merely whispered it under his breath as he
walked around and around the service bay, eyeing them with murder
in his eyes.

Finally one of the techs
gathered the courage to stand their ground and face the leering
Detective, “Sir,” he said, “It’s a modified troop shuttle. The in
system hyper-jumps she’ll be making are the stuff of stunt pilots
and professional racers. I don’t know what you’re emergency is,
because it’s above my pay grade, but whatever it is, it will get a
whole lot worse if you start popping in and out of normal space
deep in the complex gravity wells of a star system and one of the
field manipulators fails. Even a little failure, and g-forces will
turn you, the lovely police lady, and the kid over there into a
crushed pulp in a micro second. This bird isn’t going up until
she’s five-five-five, good-to-go and secured. Okay?”

Hammerstein made a low
growl at the tech but I felt a grudging respect forming. He just
raised his hands in defeat and found a place on a stainless steel
bench where Tokushima and I had been half sleeping, half
watching.

At length my rest restored me enough to
grasp the excitement and strangeness of what I was experiencing
again. This was no pleasure cruise with oversized cushions, buffets
and family chattering. The plexisteel and astercrete world of the
police base mimicked the military Spartan furnishings from which
most of these police actually came up through in their careers.

Comfort was for civies;
contemptible. We were headed to Fort Oort, and already I could feel
the sensibilities of the space Navy. As had often been the case
through Human kind’s long and twisted histories, the military’s
main source of recruitment was from men and women in the worker-bee
classes; farm boys no longer needed on the farm, daughters of fork
lift operators from corners of the worlds where economies
dragged-
children from situations and
scenarios proper society moved away from
.

Through the ages they had
come, to the brutal and uncompromising training bases. Mastering
the arts of war, ready to give that last full measure of devotion
–their very lives, everything they had and would ever have, for the
very nations and peoples who more often than not watched the wars
comfortably from home, sometimes even profiting, and
morosely,
fashionably, protesting
indignation
.

Through the ages the
soldiers had come, duty, honor, sacrifice. To stand in the horror
for their fellows. No matter what world or before the worlds’
nations; their uniforms earned in struggle and often deprivation
spoke the same words: “I will die that you may live.”

So when the pilot arrived I
wasn’t surprised he was Navy. Justin “Coco-butter” Parsons. Son of
an avocado farmer from the Southern archipelagoes, he assumed any
number of pilot clichés easily;
devil-may-care daring do, live for today because tomorrow
your hyperdrives must miss a cog, find all the pretty ladies and
give ‘em a big wet kiss before you fly away
.

Funny thing about clichés,
I realized then. Clichés or no, the pretty ladies are still
beautiful when they’re getting a big wet kiss, and the flight is
still dangerous as you order the engage command.
Beauty and danger.
They
are what they are, and those that have the mettle to pursue them,
well, they are what they are too.

Even swaggering, live for
today, Coco-butter Parsons got a big fat dose of “Uh-oh” when he
walked in to the service hangar and felt the vibes oozing off
Hammerstein. Parson’s pay grade didn’t make him privy to the
abduction of the Princess, the details of the salvaged Sunrider at
Fort Oort, or the fact that the government had commandeered the son
of an aristocratic family as psychic to root out an unsolvable
crime, but a lifetime of living by his wits and landing on his feet
gave him the sense to know this was a….well, he had some very
artful expletives in his mind when he summed up the
situation.

As a young gentleman whose
Grandmatron had always told him, “Remember who you are,
Winteroud.
Chin up and white tie for
dinner
”, I’ll of course leave the ribald
Navy expletives out of my recounting of the tale, but they are, as
I said before, rather an art form unto themselves; a proper
response, at some level, to the absurdity the universe so often
persists at presenting mankind. Sometimes even my Grandmatron would
add, “
Chin up, shoulders back, and boobs
out”,
but of course only rarely and then
with the unending embarrassment of my mother who mostly preferred
delicate pretense and propriety to the certain genius of real
recognition that we live in an absurdly off kilter universe which
we did not make.

Parsons whispered to the
head tech not knowing I could read him across the service bay, “You
got any idea what’s going on here with this little fly by night
run?”

The tech gave him a sidelong glance, “Nope.
The Detective is top brass, the kid is rich, and the female captain
is smoking hotter than a volcano. They all have to be at Fort Oort
yesterday. Any questions?”

Parson looked at the Hammerhead. “Yeah,
how’s my Honey?” He ran his gloved hand along the hull with a
loving caress.

“
Well, Officer Hammerstein
over there wasn’t too happy with the time we’ve been eating up
prepping your Hammerhead, but I’ve kept it by the
numbers.”

“
Thanks. I like coming
home with my heart still beating. Any word on the
winds?”

“
Solar wind at a minimum.
One more diagnostic and you’re good to go.”

“
Roger, Roger, Kazi,
kitty! Thanks, Buck!” Parsons quipped and climbed into the
Hammerhead and began his flight deliberations and
lockdowns.

The tech nodded to
Hammerstein and we climbed aboard. There wasn’t a thing on that
airship that didn’t need to be there except a small plastic Hula
dancer someone had glued over a structural reinforcement over the
door and painted, “Aloha baby let’s dance!” below. Dancing of
course a metaphor for combat flight. If you’re going to die in
combat, in a Hammerhead, best to do it with a Cavalier attitude.
You've either got, or you haven’t got style.

Welcome to the dance.

The Hammerhead hummed to
life and all I could think of was “The little Engine that could.”
Not much bigger than a standard city airbus, the vehicle was mostly
intended for air support of ground troops securing areas in
conflict. Their simplicity, reliability, and sheer versatility had
made them beloved of any military or police forces that acquired
them.

Steve Allman

One of the airmen buckled
us in, “Each of your seat has an emergency force field and life
support back up pending a hull breach. If you get knocked out into
the void, you’ll have twenty-four standard hours of protection.
Then the seat trips into a stasis mode to preserve you. Time will
stop within the